Books and Bookmen | Page 7

Art" to the Lake Poets--there never was a Lake school--and the Essenes.
He has much to say on Homer, and a good deal also on "Flogging in
Schools"; he can hardly let go Immanuel Kant, but if he does it is to
give his views, which are not favourable, of Wilhelm Meister; he is not
above considering the art of cooking potatoes or the question of
whether human beings once had tails, and in his theological moods he
will expound St. John's Epistles, or the principles of Christianity. The
bookman, in fact, is a quite illogical and irresponsible being, who dare
not claim that he searches for accurate information in his books as for
fine gold, and he has been known to say that that department of books
of various kinds which come under the head of "what's what," and
"why's why," and "where's where," are not literature. He does not care,
and that may be foolish, whether he agrees with the writer, and there
are times when he does not inquire too curiously whether the writer be
respectable, which is very wrong, but he is pleased if this man who
died a year ago or three hundred years has seen something with his own
eyes and can tell him what he saw in words that still have in them the
breath of life, and he will go with cheerful inconsequence from
Chaucer, the jolliest of all book companions, and Rabelais-- although

that brilliant satirist had pages which the bookman avoids, because they
make his gorge rise--to Don Quixote. If he carries a Horace, Pickering's
little gem, in his waistcoat pocket, and sometimes pictures that genial
Roman club-man in the Savile, he has none the less an appetite for
Marcus Aurelius. The bookman has a series of love affairs before he is
captured and settles down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after
he is a middle-aged married man he must confess to one or two book
friendships which are perilous to his inflammable heart.
In the days of calf love every boy has first tasted the sweetness of
literature in two of the best novels ever written, as well as two of the
best pieces of good English. One is Robinson Crusoe and the other the
Pilgrim's Progress. Both were written by masters of our tongue, and
they remain until this day the purest and most appetising introduction
to the book passion. They created two worlds of adventure with minute
vivid details and constant surprises--the foot on the sand, for instance,
in Crusoe, and the valley of the shadow with the hobgoblin in Pilgrim's
Progress--and one will have a tenderness for these two first loves even
until the end. Afterwards one went afield and sometimes got into queer
company, not bad but simply a little common. There was an endless
series of Red Indian stories in my school-days, wherein trappers could
track the enemy by a broken blade of grass, and the enemy escaped by
coming down the river under a log, and the price was sixpence each.
We used to pass the tuck-shop at school for three days on end in order
that we might possess Leaping Deer, the Shawnee Spy. We toadied
shamefully to the owner of Bull's Eye Joe, who, we understood, had
been the sole protection of a frontier state. Again and again have I tried
to find one of those early friends, and in many places have I inquired,
but my humble companions have disappeared and left no signs, like
country children one played with in holiday times.
It appears, however, that I have not been the only lover of the trapper
stories, nor the only one who has missed his friends, for I received a
letter not long ago from a bookman telling me that he had seen my
complaint somewhere, and sending me the Frontier Angel on loan
strictly that I might have an hour's sinless enjoyment. He also said he
was on the track of Bill Bidden, another famous trapper, and hoped to
send me word that Bill was found, whose original value was sixpence,
but for whom this bookman was now prepared to pay gold. One, of

course, does not mean that the Indian and trapper stories had the same
claim to be literature as the Pilgrim's Progress, for, be it said with
reverence, there was not much distinction in the style, or art in the
narrative, but they were romances, and their subjects suited boys, who
are barbarians, and there are moments when we are barbarians again,
and above all things these tales bring back the days of long ago. It was
later that one fell under the power of two more mature and exacting
charmers, Mayne Reid's Rifle Rangers and Dumas' Monte Christo. The
Rangers has vanished with many